Portable fonts and usage recommendations needed

[J. Landman Gay]

On 8/17/03 1:34 AM, Dar Scott wrote:

> Something seems hideous about this.  Is there some good reason for this 
> or was this planned from the start to torture me?

It's tempting to say it was designed just to torment you, but actually 
this has been the bane of desktop publishing and software design since 
day one. Apple first came out with TrueType fonts, later followed by 
Microsoft's version of scalable font metrics. Microsoft did it 
diferently, of course, and sharing desktop publishing documents across 
platforms became a nightmare. To make matters worse, Windows also uses a 
*third* set of metrics for its printer fonts. That means that even if 
you get something to look right on screen, it will print entirely 
differently on a PC (Macs thankfully remain consistent, since the same 
metrics are used on screen and for printing.) Windows definitely does 
not have WYSIWYG printing support by any means, and I still haven't 
figured out how commercial Windows software is able to fake it. The 
problem has bitten me more than once, and is the reason that Rev 
provides the "formatForPrinting" property to help stack authors get some 
idea of how the printout will vary from the screen display.

As others have suggested, the difficulty of assuring consistency of font 
display across platforms is rarely worth the trouble and isn't really 
reliable anyway. Most of us just get the best approximation we can, and 
let the text fall as it may. In general, if you lay out fields on 
Windows, there will be plenty of room for the same text on a Mac. If you 
lay out fields on a Mac, leave a lot of extra space for the Windows 
display. Sometimes you can adjust the field margins depending on the 
platform to give the extra pixels you need to create consistent word 
wrap, but don't count on it always being accurate. If a user doesn't 
have the fonts your stack expects, there's no telling how it will look 
and very little you can do about it.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com